Want to know the best Joan Fontaine movies?  How about the worst Joan Fontaine movies?  Curious about Joan Fontaine box office grosses or which Joan Fontaine movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Joan Fontaine movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.

Joan Fontaine (1917-2013)  was a British-American Oscar® winning actress.  Fontaine is probably best remembered for being a very frightened lady in back to back Alfred Hitchcock movies: 1940’s Rebecca and 1941’s Suspicion.  Her IMDb page shows 71 acting credits from 1935-1994. This page will rank 39 Joan Fontaine movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Television shows, uncredited roles and 5 of her very early movies  were not included in the rankings.  To do well in our overall rankings a movie has to do well at the box office, get good reviews by critics, be liked by audiences and get some award recognition.

Drivel part of the page:  After not writing about an actress for 18 straight movie pages…this Joan Fontaine marks the second straight actress we have written about.  This Fontaine page comes from a request by Søren and Flora.  The main sources used when it comes to finding the box office information came from end of the year Variety magazines, MGM ledgers, RKO ledgers and the books Joan Fontaine A Bio-Bibliograpy and No Bed Of Roses: An Autobiography (by Fontaine).

Joan Fontaine Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table

The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.

• Sort Joan Fontaine movies by co-stars of her movies
• Sort Joan Fontaine movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
• Sort Joan Fontaine movies by yearly domestic box office rank
• Sort Joan Fontaine movies by how they were received by critics and audiences.  60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
• Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and how many Oscar® wins each Joan Fontaine movie received.
• Sort Joan Fontaine movies by Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score.  UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.

Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Joan Fontaine Table

1. Seventeen Joan Fontaine movie crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark.  That is a percentage of 43.59% of her movies listed. Frenchman’s Creek (1944) was her biggest box office hit.
2. An average Joan Fontaine movie grosses $107.20 million in adjusted box office gross.
3. Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter.  29 of Joan Fontaine’s movies are rated as good movies…or 74.35% of her movies.  Rebecca (1940) is her highest rated movie while Flight to Tangier (1953) is her lowest rated movie.
4. Thirteen Joan Fontaine movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 33.33% of her movies.
5. Five Joan Fontaine movies won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 12.82% of her movies.
6. An average Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score is 39.86.  22 Joan Fontaine movie scored higher that average….or 37.28% of her movies. Rebecca (1940) got the the highest UMR Score while In Decameron Nights (1953) got the lowest UMR Score.

Possibly Interesting Facts About Joan Fontaine

1.  Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland was born  in Tokyo, Japan in 1917 to English parents.  She took her stage name from her step-father, George Fontaine.

2.  Joan Fontaine older sister is two time Best Actress Oscar® winner, Olivia de Havilland.  Joan and Olivia are the first sisters to win Oscars® and the first ones to be Oscar®-nominated in the same year.Apparently Joan and Olivia had a lifelong feud.  You can read more about that here.

3.  Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland never worked together….but they came close once.  They briefly thought about starring in a little movie called A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).  Olivia was going to play the Vivien Leigh role and Joan was going to play the Kim Hunter roe.

4.  Joan Fontaine was nominated for 3 Oscars®.  Her first nomination was for 1940’s Rebecca, 2nd nomination and only win was for 1941’s Suspicion, and her third nomination was for 1943’s The Constant Nymph.  Fontaine never received a Golden Globe® nomination.

5. Joan Fontaine had lots of interests away from Hollywood.  She was a licensed pilot, champion balloonist, expert horse rider, prize-winning tuna fisherman, a hole-in-one golfer, Cordon Bleu chef and licensed interior decorator.

6. Joan Fontaine was the last surviving cast member of George Cukor’s The Women (1939) until she passed away in December 2013.  The Women had over 130 roles in this movie, all played by women.

7.  Joan Fontaine was married four times and had one child….Debbie Dozier.

8.  Joan Fontaine was one of Fred Astaire’s many dance partners.  She however thought her movie with Astaire, A Damsel in Distress (1937) set her career back four years. At the premiere, a woman sitting behind her loudly exclaimed, “Isn’t she awful!” during Fontaine’s onscreen attempt at dancing.

9.  Joel Hirschhorn’s Rating The Movie Stars book (the inspiration for this website) rated every single Joan Fontaine performance on a 1 to 4 star basis.  These 8 Fontaine movies were deemed her very best performances.  Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941), The Constant Nymph (1943), The Affairs of Susan (1945), Letter From An Unknown Woman (1948), Something To Live For (1952), Until They Sail (1957) and Tender Is The Night (1962)

10. Check out Joan Fontaine‘s career compared to current and classic actors.  Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.

The FIVE Fontaine movies that escaped us….1937’s A Million To One, 1937 The Man Who Found Himself, 1938’s Maid’s Night Out, 1938’s Blond Cheat and 1938’s The Duke of West Point.  Will keep searching for those box office numbers…but not thinking they will ever be found.

Want more stats? Coming right up…15 Joan Fontaine Adjusted Worldwide Box Office Grosses

1. Born To Be Bad (1950) $71.70 million in adjusted worldwide box office
2. Certain Smile, A (1958) $67.40 million in adjusted worldwide box office
3. Constant Nymph, The (1943) $282.50 million in adjusted worldwide box office
4. Damsel in Distress, A (1937) $190.00 million in adjusted worldwide box office
5. From This Day Forward (1946) $152.10 million in adjusted worldwide box office
6. Gunga Din (1939) $510.30 million in adjusted worldwide box office
7. Ivanhoe (1952) $483.40 million in adjusted worldwide box office
8. No More Ladies (1935) $163.10 million in adjusted worldwide box office
9. Quality Street (1937) $42.60 million in adjusted worldwide box office
10. Serenade (1956) $120.70 million in adjusted worldwide box office
11. Sky Giant (1938) $65.20 million in adjusted worldwide box office
12. Suspicion (1941) $244.40 million in adjusted worldwide box office
13. Tender Is The Night (1962) $76.70 million in adjusted worldwide box office
14. Until They Sail (1957) $61.00 million in adjusted worldwide box office
15. Women, The (1939) $282.60 million in adjusted worldwide box office

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